Bricolage

The act or art of organization is a management of tensions. Yet while organization plays a great role in her text, Plant is untrusting of the notion of self-organization, most probably because she is leery of the concept of the unity implied by the "self," a thing she goes to great depths in the beginning quarter of Zeroes+ Ones to problematize. Organization, however, is not the same as hierarchization. An organized network does not necessarily have to be composed of the linear progression that hierarchy implies.

Plant's writing style is a testament to this. She mentions the term "bricolage" on page 79, in reference to the "wildcat activities of technical invention." Her style, a collection of vignettes dotted with quotations, is told in a particular order so that the reader is constantly bombarded and made aware of connections between topics within the text and with the text and the "outside" world of history and contemporary culture--certainly as hypertextual as a paper-bound object could be. This piecemeal, patchwork process of writing, departing significantly from the usual academic style of "this here is my thesis and the rest of the X00 or so pages will be a defense of it," implicates Plant as a bricoleur as well.

On page 80, there is a fantastic paragraph regarding the "diagonal route" that this bricoleurs navigate. In the analogy made to the carpenter, who not only planes the wood by following its fibers, but also must "follow" the wood to find it where it lies. This paragraph ends with the statement: "They are 'intuition in action.'" The intuitive aspect of bricolage is another point to highlight in this text which deals so heavily with sex: if the male-dominated scientific route is constructed by priority, by hypothesizing a problem and objectively seeking it's solution, the act of bricolage is a move away from this, one which relies upon the subjectivity of the participant. The "intuition" referenced by Plant is part of the way that the distinction between self and object is blurred.

The act of bricolage is actually alluded to much earlier in the text, though it is not called by that name. While writing on the Analytical Engine, it becomes apparent that what this object's would-be creators were attempting to incorporate into its design was a feedback system. On page 20, Plant states "The Engine 'could make judgments by comparing numbers and then act upon the result of its comparisons--thus proceeding upon lines not uniquely specified in advance by the machine's instructions." This act, one we have referred to earlier in the class as "learning," I believe could also be termed bricolage due to its self-referential aspect. The comparisons Plant makes between machine and woman is furthermore underscored by this additional tension between the two: I am particularly thinking of page 123, when the author discusses how women teleoperators began to communicate with one-another, instead of acting as the conduits through which information could pass through. These women were becoming embedded and part of the systems they seemed to operate: the links they create and the exchanges they made were the creation of networks, the negotiation of tensions, and they were bricoleurs in that they had to pick this all up amongst themselves.